Literary Study

Passionate Attention

Richard L. McGuire’s Passionate Attention: An Introduction to Literary Study provides an overview of four approaches to investigating literature. In 80 pages, it offers a summary of my entire literary criticism course in college. Maybe that’s why the professor recommended that we pick up a copy. I did, obediently. But then I plunged, along with the rest of the class, into Walter Jackson Bate’s text . Not until now, mumble-mumble years later, have I followed through on Passionate Attention.

In a way, the title might be misleading. “Literary study” might imply that this will take up the structural components of a given genre: plot, theme, character, etc. But actually, in its focus on criticism Passionate Attention concerns itself with a second layer of literary study: the perspective a student of literature takes on a given work. It’s the difference between describing the insect, and describing the microscope through which it’s viewed. Passionate Attention is about the microscopes available for analyzing literature. “I wanted to write a book that would give readers and students of literature a comprehensive frame for their own particular interests,” writes McGuire, “and which would also help them to identify and assess the other approaches to literature that they encounter in classes, reading, and conversation.”

McGuire suggests four “ways of seeing”: the work for itself, the mimetic possibilities, the affective possibilities, and the expressive possibilities. Ideally, the critic employs all four when working towards an understanding of a poem or story. We examine its formal properties, its successfulness as imitation of some aspect of the “real world” outside the confines of the poem, its power to generate a response (and what kind of response it generates), and its relationship to its craftsman and its historical context. McGuire discusses the different lines of inquiry readers might take under these four headings, then concludes with a couple of examples of poem analysis incorporating the different approaches.

It’s an excellent breakdown of the different possibilities for analysis, and I enjoyed revisiting my lit crit class in condensed form. It got me thinking about what critical approaches I favor, and why. Throughout, I appreciated McGuire’s straighforward love for literary art and his good sense. He points out the unique contribution each approach can make in our study of a given work, as well as the point beyond which it can become counterproductive. Nowhere does he lose focus on our reasons for reading: delight, transformation, instruction, and a fuller participation in the human community. He never implies that literary analysis ought to be “objective and detached” in order to be valid — as the Auden phrase borrowed in the title suggests, our engagement with books should involve “passionate attention.” He puts it this way:

What the student should realize is that the uniqueness of his responses and insights is precisely that which makes them valuable, because that is also the value in the literature he is reading. His attempt to convey these insights to others (which is literary criticism in its simplest form) is an affirmation of the richness of human experience that is reflected both in the work and its reader.

Passionate Attention is short, and remarkably thorough. Academic in tone, it offers a coherent picture of the options for deepening our engagement with books.

Comments Off on Passionate Attention